Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp)

[Thomas Weber]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:56:18AM +0100, Søren Hauberg wrote:
> fre, 13 02 2009 kl. 10:31 +0100, skrev Rafael Laboissiere:
> > Putting my Debian package maintainer hat on , I must say that we (the DOG,
> > Debian Octave Group) have been doing this kind of "stable bug fixing" work
> > for the Debian packages since ages. Indeed, it is a lot of work, but we need
> > to close the bug reports that are filed against our packages by our users.
> > 
> > I tend to agree with Thomas that is is important to provide a stable branch
> > that is alive and as bug-free as we can.  However, I also agree with John
> > that this is a time sink for the upstream developers.  On the other hand, if
> > people with enough free time are willing to do it, like Jaroslav recently,
> > why not do it?  Of course, porting fixes from the development branch must be
> > done with extreme care.  This is what we usually do in the DOG.
> 
> I'm saying this, without knowing anything about anything, so feel free
> to consider this pure bullshit... 
> 
> If the DOG is doing this kind of work, why can't you guys just be the
> release managers for the stable series? It just sounds like there is a
> large overlap between maintaining the stable branch and maintaining
> Octave in a distribution.

There is at least one reason why I don't like such a proposal (and they
are different from Rafael's). First, I believe that an original software
maintainer should almost *never* be a package maintainer for a
distribution. Such things result in conflicts of interests. Example: We
had a bug in Debian that the uninstall process of an octave-forge
package failed. It turned out that pkg.m throws an error when called
without an existing /usr/share/octave/packages directory (we come to
this situation as the Debian package manager dpkg removes the then empty
directory /usr/share/octave/packages)

>From a distributions point of view, that is a bug. I'm not so sure about
Octave. It's a valid point of view to say that calling 'pkg rebuild'
with a non-existing /u/s/o/p directory is a user-error. 

A different point of view are platforms. I use Linux almost exclusively,
so I don't really care about other platfoms (ignoring that I have no
chance to actually test an installation on a Windows system).

        Thomas